The Prizewinners of Piedmont Place

by Bill Doyle

  “Imo!” he shouted in the direction of her workshop.

  “What?” she called without opening the door.

  “Is this something you’d wear?” he asked.

  She peeked her head out and saw him holding up a yellow T-shirt with a flower on it.

  “Oh brother,” she said, and closed the door again.

  Cal hoped she was still watching through a crack. He put on the T-shirt and looked at the camera. Getting as close to Imo’s voice as he could, he said, “I’d like a spacecraft laboratory.”

  He knew he looked adorable.

  A minute later, Cal called, “Dad!” and slid on a giant pair of fake glasses. After singing a short song about tinfoil in his dad’s voice, he yelled for Bug. Cal lifted his hands in the air like a champion, marched around, and barked, “Rabbo!”

  When Cal started to put on one of Butler’s old dog collars, his parents and Imo finally came out onto the patio.

  “Okay, this is just—” Imo said.

  “The cutest thing ever?” Cal finished for her.

  She shook her head. “No, really, really creepy. Stop dressing up and acting like us.”

  “But—”

  “If you do,” Mr. T. said, “we’ll make the video with you, okay? But only the video. And then that’s the end of all this contest business.”

  “Your dad and I both work very hard during the day,” Mrs. T. said. “So we don’t have time for nonsense.”

  “Thanks!” Cal said. “And, Dad, I’m sure Mr. Wylot would want you to do it.” At the name Mr. Wylot, his dad’s face clouded over. Cal needed to change the subject quickly. “The deadline to submit the video is seven o’clock tomorrow.”

  Imo said, “That’s just twenty-five hours away.”

  Bug barked to Butler. The meaning was clear. It was impossible.

  “No, Bug,” Cal said. “That’s plenty of time. Imo, you build the sets. Mom, we need more facts about the store. Dad can write the jingle—you know, catchy music that will get stuck in people’s heads.”

  Mrs. T. frowned. “Let’s leave Dad out of this. Mr. Wylot is being a major—” She interrupted herself and started again. “Work is very challenging for your dad right now.”

  “No, Mom, we can’t leave anyone out,” Cal said. “We have to be the perfect family. Dad is always picking words out of the dictionary—like, I don’t know…”

  Imo chimed in, “Polyphagous?”

  “Exactly,” Cal said. “So writing a jingle about Wish Shoppe should be a breeze!”

  Mr. T. nodded. “I’ll come up with something on my lunch break. What about you, Cal? What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll write the script and direct, of course.”

  Bug barked again. He wanted a job, too.

  Cal shook his head. “Bug, you’ll just be Bug.”

  By the next afternoon, the Talaskas’ backyard was transformed. Imo had used old cardboard from refrigerator boxes to build a set where they could shoot the video. She had turned the cardboard into walls and started to paint them white with blue trim, just like the walls in Wish Shoppe.

  It looked amazing. Then Bug dipped Butler’s tail in blue paint and chased the dog around the backyard. Butler’s tail smeared blue paint all over the patio and one of the cardboard walls, so Imo ended up painting the whole set blue.

  When Mr. T. got home from work, his gaze landed on the muddy ditch Cal had dug. It was his version of the River of Low Prices, which ran between the Wish Shoppe and the parking lot.

  Cal wondered if an insect was crawling on his dad’s face. Mr. T.’s cheek was twitching, and a vein in his neck had popped out. He turned around and went inside. Cal could hear him counting to ten. When Mr. T. came back out with Mrs. T., he didn’t look quite as red.

  “All right, I’m ready, Mr. Director,” he said, turning his glasses on a slant. “How can we make this thing soar?”

  Mrs. T. smiled, and Cal handed his dad a script. Mr. T. flipped through it, and his eyes widened with each page. “Uh…okay. Whatever you say.”

  Ten minutes later, the family had taken their positions.

  Cal put the camera back on the patio table. He pressed RECORD and rushed to his place.

  “Action!” Cal called out.

  Imo had glued a handle on the lawn luge so it looked like a huge shopping cart. Mr. T. pushed it in front of the camera.

  “Hello…Talaska…family!” Mr. T. said in a wooden voice, reading from the script.

  “Why, hello there, uh, stranger!” Mrs. T. said back, reading her line. “How are you?”

  “I am…super great,” Mr. T. said. “You know why? Because I am shopping at Wish Shoppe, where I can get whatever I want!” He pretended to pull a mask off his face. “And guess what! It’s me, your Talaska dad!”

  “Oh! What a, uh, surprise!” Mrs. T. said in fake shock. “We were having so much fun shopping here at Wish Shoppe that we didn’t even know it was you!”

  Cal jumped out in front of the camera. “We’re the Talaskas!”

  Imo threw a bucket of water toward the set just as Butler bumped into her. The water missed its target and splashed onto Cal’s pants.

  Gasping, Cal stopped acting. “Why did you do that?” he demanded.

  “It’s rain!” Imo said.

  Cal’s script said there should be a rain shower, a snowstorm, and a mild hurricane. He wanted to show that the Talaskas were the perfect Wish Shoppe family under any conditions.

  “You ready for the snow?” Imo asked.

  “No!” Cal shouted.

  “What about the butterflies?”

  Cal shook his head. “Let’s just say our lines and talk about what we want at Wish Shoppe. You go first, Imo.”

  Imo faced the camera, and she suddenly looked as terrified as if a stampede of buffalo were about to flatten her. Cal didn’t get it. How could she argue to the death with him about the perfect temperature of milk but then get frozen by a tiny camera?

  Cal stood behind Imo and said in her voice, “My name is Imo. I want a spacecraft laboratory. My mom wants a gym. My dad will grab an orchestra. My handsome, so-much-smarter-than-me older brother will take a video game system. My little brother and our dog want something amazing, too, but only they know what it is!”

  That was their cue to start singing the jingle that Mr. T. had written. The family stood together by the muddy moat and sang:

  “Oh, Wish Shoppe, you cause our hearts to hop!

  Please never stop making those high prices drop!

  Oh, Wish Shoppe, you give the best impression!

  We have just one or two quick questions:

  In your name, what’s with the extra P?

  Isn’t it time to maybe set it free?

  Into the River of Low Prices let it flow—”

  “Hee,” Mrs. T. said in a burst of laughter while the others kept singing:

  “It’s something we need to know—”

  “Hee hee,” Imo said.

  The hee-hees were like a virus, leaping from one person to the next. Cal could feel his shoulders shake. NO! Control. This is too important.

  Still looking into the camera, he tried to keep a straight face. He could feel his mom and Imo struggling, too. Finally, it popped out of Cal’s mouth. “Hee hee.”

  His dad joined in. “Hee. Hee. Hee. Hee.” And then his mom. Soon the only ones singing were Butler, who was howling, and Bug, who chirped nonsense sounds. The others were gasping for breath as their laughter picked up steam.

  “What’s…with the…extra P!” Mrs. T. managed to say, tears streaming down her face as she clutched her sides.

  “Let it flow!” Mr. T. added, and doubled over. “Set it free!”

  “What rhymes with free, Dad?” Imo asked, collapsing on the ground. “It starts with a P!”

  Cal stumbled around, unable to stop laughing, and then fell over next to Imo. Soon the Talaskas were rolling on the grass like hysterical hyenas. With his own high-pitched giggles, Bug dove onto the heap. And then Butler
jumped on top of all of them. The dog flipped over and started squirming on his back, rubbing against the family and somehow making everything seem funnier.

  Cal was laughing so hard, he was worried he would actually set free his own extra P.

  “Cal!” Mrs. T. wheezed. “Your pants!”

  Oh no, Cal thought, realizing what he must look like. His pants were soaked from the fake rain!

  “The Butler did it!” he managed to gasp. His words brought even more waves of laughter, and everyone clutched their stomachs. Finally, after thirty more seconds of complete nuttiness, Cal staggered to his feet and looked at his watch. Oh man. They only had an hour to finish the video and upload it to the Wish Shoppe site.

  “All right! All right!” he said, wiping the tears from his face and spitting out a clump of Butler’s fur. “From the top!”

  They ran through Cal’s script quickly. This time, they managed to do it without anyone bursting into hysterics.

  “That’s a wrap, people,” Cal said. “Imo, can you fix it up and add the music and sound effects?”

  “Sure,” Imo said, taking the camera to make the changes on it.

  Half an hour later, when she announced she was done, Cal glanced at his watch.

  “Good timing,” he said. “Ten minutes to go until the video is due.”

  Imo perched in front of the computer and opened the Wish Shoppe website. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “What is it?” Cal asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “With our dial-up connection,” Imo said, “it will take over fifteen minutes to upload the video.”

  “We’re not going to make it,” Mrs. T. said. “There’s not enough time.”

  Cal put his head in his hands. “No, no, no,” he groaned.

  Tugging her ear, Imo announced, “Then it’s a good thing I can optimize the connection and have it uploaded in nine minutes.”

  “Do it!” Cal shouted, and Imo got to work. She plugged the camera into the computer, and her fingers flew across the keyboard.

  “Go, go, go!” the whole family was chanting. They watched the bar that showed how much of the upload was left. It was going to be close. Then—bing!

  “We did it!” Cal said.

  Just barely. Seconds later, the contest screen was replaced by these words:

  Hello, dreamers! The time for Great Grab Contest entries has passed. Good luck to our three finalists. The two winning families of the next round will be revealed in three weeks on the Wish Shoppe billboard in Hawkins, Michigan! Till then, wish well!

  —King Wonder

  “What do we do now?” Cal asked.

  Mrs. T. answered with the hardest words for Cal to hear.

  “We wait.”

  To Cal, waiting was like bathing in his brother’s used bathwater. It was torture.

  Every day, Cal rode his bike by the Wish Shoppe billboard on Palmer’s Farm. He would stare at the sign for almost an hour, hoping King Wonder would announce the two finalist families early.

  Instead, the electronic sign showed the same commercial over and over: King Wonder running around a Wish Shoppe with his Butterfly of Savings. The butterfly was a direct descendant of the one that King had had as a kid, and it lived for a month in each new store he built. In the ad, King flapped his arms like a butterfly. He glided around the Wish Shoppe’s confusing Nine Circles of Dreams, or departments, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

  Cal thought he’d go crazy from the waiting. The days seemed to stretch on forever. The rest of the family didn’t have the same problem.

  Bug and Butler practiced their fake B&B Scooter Madness Stunt in the backyard. Bug scratched behind Butler’s ears and grabbed on to a rope on his collar. Butler took off, pulling Bug on his scooter toward the patio seat cushion. At the last second, they made a wide turn to miss it. They did this again and again.

  Mrs. T. was keeping busy with her work. She brought a famous pole-vaulter to town. He spoke at Wylot Auditorium about leaping over obstacles in life. Cal went to listen to the speech. It had mushy parts and funny lines, but nothing about waiting. So it wasn’t overly helpful.

  Then it was the day when the last two finalist families would be announced. Well, kind of. It was 12:01 AM, and Cal was lying in bed wide awake. His mind was racing. Whose videos would be picked—the Rivales’, the Wylots’, or the Talaskas’?

  Bug’s bed was across the room, and Cal could hear him mumbling something in his sleep. Snuggled up next to Bug, a sleeping Butler grunted, “Rabbo,” as if he agreed with whatever Bug was saying.

  Cal tried everything to get back to sleep. At 4:30 AM, he finally gave up.

  He was in the kitchen waiting for his family when they got up hours later. Bug came bounding down in his stunt-car driver outfit, complete with bright-purple helmet and neon-green goggles.

  Why was Bug wearing his favorite clothes? Cal wondered. Then it hit him.

  Oh man. The Wylots’ party. The contest had pushed it out of his head. For some reason, he’d never noticed that the Great Grab announcement was on the same day as the party.

  Mr. T. was right behind Bug. “Sorry, little man,” Mr. T. said to him. “Today’s a big party. You’ve got to change into other clothes.”

  Under the helmet, Bug’s face started to scrunch.

  “BTA!” Imo said, coming down the stairs. She was wearing her overalls, her tool belt, and at least eight hair clips shaped like spaceships from Star Wars.

  Mr. T. looked at Bug to see if a tantrum might be on its way. He didn’t seem to like what he saw. “Okay, okay,” Mr. T. said. “I guess we’ll all wear whatever we want.”

  Bug liked that idea. His face unscrunched and he barked.

  “We can’t go to the party,” Cal said. “We have to be at the billboard for the big announcement.”

  His mom had just come into the kitchen, still in her robe. “We’ll go to the party first,” Mrs. T. said. “And then we’ll drive by the billboard to check out who won.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Mr. T. said, and yawned.

  Cal could tell that no one in his family thought they had a shot in today’s elimination round. But he also knew better than to argue with his parents this early in the morning. It would only backfire.

  Instead, he turned his sights on Imo and her overalls. “You know Leslie is just going to make fun of you, right?” he said.

  “Why?” Imo said, touching her spaceship hair clips. “Because the Millennium Falcon doesn’t match my eyes?”

  But he could tell she knew what he meant. Cal decided to let it drop.

  When the Talaskas arrived at the Wylots’ mansion, they went straight to the backyard, which was the size of a football field. The entire town had been invited. Hundreds of people were chatting in small groups around the party, but everyone looked a little nervous. Cal knew they were all thinking the same thing: What was the big surprise?

  A line of waiters in tuxedos held trays of glasses filled with ice-cold water. Toward the back fence were six barbecue pits with sizzling chicken, steaks, and potatoes. The smells were amazing. Drool dripped from Cal’s lips before he could catch it.

  But the barbecue pits were blocked off from the crowd by thick velvet ropes. Guests who got too close were hit by little spitballs that shot from the trees behind the pits. Splat! Ms. Graves was struck between the eyes. Splot! The mailman got hit right on the nose.

  After that, everyone kept their distance. Cal wandered off, looking for unguarded snacks and to see if James was there yet. As he walked, he saw a life-sized, gold-covered statue of Mr. Wylot. And beyond it was a pool that held more water than Lake Michigan.

  The five Rivales were the only ones swimming in the pool. Well, kind of swimming. Mr. and Mrs. Rivale and the triplets were performing a pretty wacky routine, moving through the water like synchronized otters.

  “What are they doing in there?” Leslie Wylot said. Cal turned. Leslie and Alison Mangan were walking past him toward the pool. Cal was glad Leslie was too busy focusing on
other people to bother Imo.

  He shrugged. “It is a pool party, right? The Rivales are just going for a swim.”

  “Well, I guess there is plenty of room in the pool,” Leslie said, stroking her braids. “After all, it’s the largest one in the county. That’s not bragging, you know, because you can Google it.”

  Cal rolled his eyes. Alison smiled and rolled her eyes, too. Leslie saw it.

  “Fetch me a glass of water, would you, best friend?” Leslie said to Alison. Alison’s smile disappeared.

  “Sure, Leslie, no problem,” Alison said in an embarrassed whisper.

  “She does whatever I say,” Leslie said proudly after Alison left. “My family’s company is growing all over the world. Her dad might—or might not—get a promotion from my father. Keeps her on her toes.”

  “So not cool,” Cal said.

  “Ground Control to Leslie,” Imo said. She had come up behind them. “We regret to inform you that you seem to have lost contact with reality.”

  “Oh, you Talaskas,” Leslie said, as if disappointed. “You still can’t take a joke. But I think that’s about to change.”

  Before Cal could respond, a loud screech filled the air, and everyone turned. Mr. Wylot stood on the back deck, tapping a microphone. Cal and Imo joined their family as the rest of the party drifted toward Mr. Wylot. Leslie walked like a princess up the steps and posed proudly next to her dad. Her mom and her older sister, Emma, were already there.

  “Welcome to my estate!” Mr. Wylot boomed into the microphone. Several people covered their ears, but Mr. Wylot didn’t seem to notice.

  “You might be wondering why we haven’t served any food yet,” he said, wiping crumbs off his chin. “I like the people around me to be hungry. Especially the people who work for me. And, let’s face it…that’s just about everyone here.”

  “Ha! Ha!” Alison’s dad laughed, but no one else did.

  Mr. Wylot gave him an annoyed look, then continued. “I want to introduce you to our daughters, Leslie and Emma. Watch out for Emma’s little booby traps around the estate—she’s quite a military genius, that one. My wife, Olga, and I are so proud of the good work our girls do in the community.”